birdie-github/badprocess-guard

BadProcess Guard is a small desktop tool for Linux and Windows that watches your computer for applications using too much processor power and lets you shut them down with one click. It runs quietly in the background and only shows a small floating alert window when a program or group of related programs crosses a CPU usage limit you set. Once the busy program calms down, the alert disappears on its own. The tool can watch whole families of related processes together, not just single programs. For example, a web browser often starts several helper processes, and this tool can group all of them under one line showing their combined CPU usage, while other CPU-heavy programs are listed on their own. Which programs get grouped together, and what friendly name they show, is controlled through a simple text configuration file rather than being built into the program itself. When you decide to stop a runaway program, the tool asks for confirmation first, then offers a gentle close or a forced kill, matching the normal ways each operating system asks programs to shut down or forces them to stop. After doing so, it immediately checks again to confirm the program is gone, rather than waiting for its normal check-in schedule. Settings such as how often it checks CPU usage, how long an alert stays visible, the transparency of the alert window, and the CPU percentage that counts as too busy are all adjustable and saved to a configuration file in your user folder. The interface itself is intentionally minimal, showing just a program name, an identifying number, and a CPU percentage, with more detail available if you hover over it or open the shutdown dialog. The project is built with the Qt framework in C++ and can be compiled with either of two major Qt versions. The README notes the original idea came from a named contributor and that the implementation itself was built with the help of an AI coding assistant.